On paper, Ricky Gervais’ latest series sounds promisingly wicked: In After Life, the Office and Extras creator plays a recent widower who’s so angry about his wife’s death that he decides to punish everyone around him by being an unfiltered asshole. Rather than some kind of madcap dark comedy, the “punishment” takes the form of a dreary, sarcastic self-pity party that also manages—in a magic trick perhaps only Gervais is capable of pulling off—to constantly point out its protagonist’s intellectual superiority. (And atheism. It’s a Gervais joint, so there’s gotta be some discourse on the obvious beauty of atheism.)
In the first of After Life’s six half-hours, Gervais’ character, Tony, meets a series of broadly drawn idiots—small-town simpletons whose stupidity only shines a light on his smarts. There’s an idiot mailman, an idiot grocery-store stocker, and idiot local citizens of his small town whose stories he’s forced to tell for his job as a human-interest writer at a tiny newspaper. Even his best pal—Game Of Thrones bit player Tony Way—is subject to his constant harassment, most often about his weight. If the jokes were funny, that’d be one thing, but they’re delivered through the haze of Tony’s grief, and therefore mostly undersold and exhausted.
We learn that Tony wasn’t always a nihilistic prick, via video messages from his dead, saintly wife, Lisa (Kerry Godliman). As if addressing the audience directly, she tells Tony what a good man he is, how funny he is, and how happy certain things make him. Weirdly, Tony also flips through old home movies in which he plays dumb, vaguely mean practical jokes on Lisa—blowing an air horn while she’s painting, throwing cold water on her while she’s sleeping at the beach—and she just loves it. Truly this was his soul mate, putting up with (and encouraging!) him. Maybe it makes sense that after 25 years of marriage he knows what a unicorn she truly was for dealing with him.
In the aftermath of Lisa’s death, Tony isn’t just a spoiled brat but a helpless manchild as well: Though 50-ish years old, he apparently doesn’t know how to shop for groceries or feed himself, pathetically downing old cans of food with his beloved German shepherd. (The dog also serves as his excuse for not killing himself on several occasions, even as he half-heartedly brings a blade to his wrist in the bathtub.)
Somehow, someway, everyone in After Life remains patient with Tony as he sullenly lashes out, and he even manages to gain a coterie of new friends, including a heroin addict with whom he does drugs, a prostitute with a heart of gold who helps clean up his house, a cub reporter on his newspaper who worships him for no clear reason, and the woman who takes care of his father with Alzheimer’s. (That’d be Extras’ Ashley Jensen, so criminally underused here that her character’s name is mentioned maybe once, in passing.)
So saintly and understanding are his old and new friends that Tony is challenged only by his brother-in-law/boss, and only then when Tony crosses what turns out to be a totally inconsequential line. His self-involved therapist, constantly checking Twitter and saying inappropriate things, offers occasional laughs but feels flown in from another show altogether. Never in After Life does there appear to be much dramatic conflict at all, or any danger of real consequence. More than one character remarks to Tony that he doesn’t actually want to kill himself, a notion with which he seems to quietly agree.
A chance meeting with a widow at the graveyard—her husband just happens to be buried right next to his wife, both plots conveniently situated in front of a bench they can chat on!—gives Tony a chance to wrestle with his emotions in front of someone he actually appears to respect. If her life advice were any more sweet or perfect, she would have to be a ghost. That scenario might actually be easier to swallow than the happenstance that leads to their initial meeting and repeated chance encounters.
Even at the depths of his misery, it’s impossible to feel much sympathy for Tony, who makes destructive decisions with an air of smugness rather than desperation. But gradually and unfortunately, Tony is stricken with dark comedy’s mortal enemies: self-realization and personal growth. A conversation with his brother-in-law shakes him up. There’s a death so tonally awkward and quickly forgotten that it beggars belief. And yet life, Tony somehow learns, might be worth living after all—an idea that he still manages to square explicitly with his atheism.
And really, if it weren’t for Tony’s (and Gervais’) insistence on the non-existence of a god—and some of the language, perhaps—After Life might have fit nicely in some alternate-universe version of the Hallmark Channel. It feels like one of those Christian-leaning, lessons-learned films, twisted slightly for a while and then bent right back into easily anticipated, perfectly predictable shapes. As a meaningful meditation on grief, After Life is dead on arrival. As a comedy, it’s good only for a few passing chuckles. It wants so badly to be both comedy and drama—to be both funny and touching—that it fails pretty spectacularly at both.
170 Comments
Yikes. This sounds like Gervais turned Johnen Vasquez’ comic, Wobbly Headed Bob into a show.
Oh wow, thanks for reminding me to do my bi-annual google search for Vasquez and see this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_Zim:_Enter_the_Florpus!
Wow, that’s slated to come out in the next few months!
a prostitute with a heart of gold who helps clean up his houseI’ll tell you what, Big Prostitute does some excellent PR work. I had a roommate who was known to frequent these women, and I have to tell you, they do not live up to the standards Hollywood would have you believe.
I want a show that features a prostitute with a heart of bronze. She’s reasonably friendly, but has her own shit she has to deal with first.
That’s pretty much The Deuce.
After Relevance.Netflix. [Du-dum.]
BUT HE’S AN ATHEIST THEREFORE HE’S BETTER THAN EVERYONE!!!!!!111111
I think you have that backward–he’s better than everyone, therefore he’s an atheist.
IS IT SOMETHING LIKE BEING A VEGAN?
This is such an American thing to say.
The appeal of atheism for me would be not having to DO anything. I’ll never get the atheists who put in more work than the average religious person.
This. It’s a vocal minority, but it’s a lot of effort for zero reward, because you just end up in the same place. It’s not like they think being an atheist will get you into some afterlife or save you from being damned or something.
These atheists only goal is to “trigger” people.Which is why many of these atheists like Sargon of Akkad and Pat Condell end up in The Alt-Right. Once they ran out of religious people to piss off, they now target Leftists, Feminists, LGBT and Ethnic Minorities.
It’s why I’m glad I’m agnostic. Atheism just seems like so much effort these days.
Atheism has become a belief system.
Gervais’ output since Extras has really delivered diminishing returns (to put it kindly). It feels like he bought into his own hype and has tried to cultivate the persona of “smartest man in the room.” This review doesn’t give me hope that this trend will change anytime soon.One of things I enjoyed about The Office, Extras, and his podcast was he didn’t take himself too seriously. He was smug for sure, but he made plenty of jokes at his own expense.
even Extras was pushing it for me. That finale was pretty tone-deaf, I thought
I don’t remember the finale, but Pros: amazing bit work by Patrick Stewart, Kate Winslet, Radcliffe, and others; Ashley Jensen overallCons: they couldn’t think of anything to do with the show but make Andy famous. I bet every extra in LA has 10000 stories they could have put Andy through, but they jumped from the premise pretty quickly.I couldn’t sit through much of Life is Short but the Neeson bit in the first episode is really an all-time classic.
‘Extras’ will always be worth it for the Patrick Stewart bit. He’s so fucking sincere throughout it. “But I’ve already seen everything. I’ve seen it all.”
Extras was very good, but the “Christmas special” post-finale finale was absolutely appalling. Gervais’ cruelty to his characters was downright chilling to behold.
yup agree, I might be combining that episode with the finale in my mind as well.
The actual finale was a very nice episode with Robert De Niro. The Xmas special was just…horrifying.
yeah thats def what I was thinking of as the Finale
Good. Never, EVER watch the Christmas special that came after.
I think he’s been coasting off the goodwill from The Office. Extras was ok, but I can’t watch any of his other stuff.
Without Stephen Merchant, he’s not that funny.
I liked Derek and felt for him, it was kind of a bold choice. While the character may have been wise, you couldn’t call him the smartest man in the room and the show’s concept wasn’t going to draw in the big bucks.
It’s almost admirable in its perfectly linear descent. Each one worse than the last.
The man was built to be David Brent and then the podcast was brilliant as well. I like Ricky Gervais a lot but everything else he’s done has been a chore.
The Ricky Gervais Showwas my gateway into podcasting, so I’ll always have some affection for that. But anything recent, no thanks.
Gervais’s acting roles: Athiest asshole, Celebrity, Retard.
So not acting at all, really.
His “I’m better than all of you” got exposed when he hosted those Golden Globe Awards. That’s been his persona ever since.
Got to agree. It used to be a bit of schtick, the “I’m better than you thing” but it’s constant now. His latest podcast series is truly awful. The smugness of it was unbearable. He used the term “as a comedian….” constantly in a manner that Spider-Man would have used the term “as a superhero”. It is sickening smug and completely out of touch with realityIm glad to see this got a poor review. I watched one episode after getting a few recommendations from people I wouldn’t nutmeg trust to recommend (my own smugness perhaps?). It was poorly written and just devoid of reality
It feels like he bought into his own hypeYou mean you didn’t see the roundtable discussion with Gervais, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Louis C.K.? The Gervais produced show meant he could put himself at the same level, comedically and intellectually, as the other comedians.
“A prostitute with a heart of gold who helps him clean up his house”: Reddit’s definition of a perfect woman.
Gervais’s trade now seems to be making average, clichéd TV shows and films that he would have mocked on Extras or whilst hosting the Globes (the biggest culprit being that Special Correspondents film from a couple of years back – you can’t take the piss out of The Tourist and then make something so equally empty, awful and dull). It’s amazing how much empathy he built up for Brent and Andy in The Office and Extras but seems unable to handle emotions or relationships with any nuance anymore. Derek just slapped on a Coldplay-scored montage so you know it was time to be bittersweet, On the Road had two or three characters who were there solely to tell the audience that Brent was alright without earning any of it (especially the bullshit snow machine ending) and Special Correspondents had the subplot with his wife being awful just to make him sympathetic and allow him to win KellyMcDonald’s heart at the end of the film – again, with no build or or earning of it. Sounds like this is just more of the same – which is a shame because I would love for Gervais to have one more big win in him. The man who gave us (/co-gave us) The Office, Extras, his first couple of stand up specials and the radio show/podcasts deserves it.
There’s a behind-the-scenes video on the Extras DVD where, during a moment of hardship, Ricky says “This is where there would be a montage set to Coldplay”.And then he actually fucking did that during Derek. I think that was the point where I thought Ricky’s output probably wasn’t for me.
‘The Office’ had such a strong core of humanism to it that has been so absent from Gervais’ output and general personality since that I have to wonder if it all came from Merchant to begin with.
Life’s Too Short was the last great Gervais project. And that’s DESPITE him minis that brilliant Liams Neesoms scene.Also: why have I been put in pending approval jail? Please let me out!
“meets a series of broadly drawn idiots—small-town simpletons whose stupidity only shines a light on his smarts.”It’s like the average AvClubber’s conception of Trump voters
“And yet life, Tony somehow learns, might be worth living after all—an idea that he still manages to square explicitly with his atheism.”
I’m not totally sure I understand this line. Maybe I’m misreading it. Is the implication here that atheists shouldn’t reasonably be able to come to the conclusion that life is worth living?
Not 100% here, but I read it that you would expect someone who’s an atheist to find worth in living regardless, not because of, of their atheism – i.e. there’s nothing so there’s nothing to square. But for some reason Gervais finds a need to talk about his atheism even though the existence or non-existence of a deity in the particular situation should be of no consequence to the story.
On the other hand, if one believes in a second, better and infinitely long, life after their life on earth then why wouldn’t they view their mortal life as having less value than someone who believes that they only have a limited amount of time to exist?
Possibly, sure, but that’s separate from finding value without an afterlife/ no god. I just read the scene as just being annoying though. Look at all the people who get upset at someone like Chris Pratt because he says “I LOVE JESUS!” or whatever. I’m not an atheist, but I eye roll most of those types of god-proclamations, because hey who gives a shit, so I’d expect some non-believers to eye roll the proclamations of non-belief.
Oh, I definitely think Ricky Gervais is annoying. I just wasn’t sure whether I was reading the reviewer’s opinion correctly. I actually misread your first reply, and didn’t catch what you were saying until I read it a second time. I’m a slow starter in the mornings. 😀
I’m a hedonist so if people gain pleasure out of believing more power to them!
“Is the implication here that atheists shouldn’t reasonably be able to come to the conclusion that life is worth living?”
Yes, stupid. That’s exactly what he meant, obviously.
Classy.
Not as classy as purposely pretending you don’t understand something so that you can play the victim card, I suppose.
lol
That isn’t what they were doing at all. It was a legitimate question.
No, it was bullshit.
Well, that’s how that sentence reads, but I suppose it’s “stupid” to interpret words as meaning what they mean.Of course, perhaps that seeming like an odd meaning might explain why none shy ASKED.But I guess if one is in a big rush to declare others “stupid,” it might be easy to forget what questions are for.
No, the point is that, in-show, the character had initially appealed to his atheism to bolster his sense of nihilism
Ah, okay, so I did misread it, thanks. 🙂
I read it as “this irrelevant aspect was wedged into this scene unnecessarily.”Replace “atheism” with various other -isms (try “veganism,” “socialism,” and “capitalism,” for starters) and it becomes clearer why it’s weird.
It’s more that Gervais gets on his soapbox again re: atheism, not that atheists are incapable of finding life worth living.
It just seems to confirm more and more that Stephen Merchant was the brilliant one of the two. Post extras its really obvious to see. Fighting with my family vs whatever this is
We probably wouldn’t know who Stephen Merchant was without Gervais.Marketing is an important part of art.
See also: Hello Ladies.
The mystery of why Gervais isn’t funny any more isn’t exactly difficult to crack: he makes good to great stuff when he works with Stephen Merchant, and forgettable to terrible stuff when he doesn’t. He’s only funny when he has someone there to shape his worst aspects and fit them into the tone of something larger. When it’s just Gervais indulging himself, it’s like eating a cake made by a toddler who figures that if a cup of sugar is good, five must be great. Just look at his execrable David Brent follow-up: a nearly perfect character in the context of the office, made unwatchable without understanding that it can’t all be cringe.
It’s like Jerry Seinfeld without Larry David
The mystery of why Gervais isn’t funny any more isn’t exactly difficult to crack: he was never funny in the first place.Fixed it for you.
I dunno, man, as much as he’s a parody of himself now, he did some pretty great stuff. The Office was an amazingly great show, and Brent was an amazingly great character.
I have a feeling that Merchant was responsible for the David Brent character – he created it specifically to make fun of Gervais.
Extras was also good Gervais but only the first season of “Idiot Abroad” was funny Gervais (even though Merchant was there for 2)
The Office was shite.It was a poor version of much better shows.
Hot take, coming through!
It’s just the truth, Operation Goodguys, People Like Us, the little films Victoria Wood used to do, are all so much better than “turns to camera, gurns like a twat”.The sad thing about him is, he though Merchant’s talent was his.
That’s fine and you may well be right but this is some super duper hipster shit right here. Doesn’t make you wrong, just makes you kinda jerky.
How is being alive to watch the series that came out a decade before the Office “Hipster Shit”.I’m a literal old person not some teen on an imdb bender trying to find shows, I watched those shows on TV when they aired you gormless moron.“Fucking hispsters and their [shuffles deck] being alive in the 80s”
Calm down.
Okay. But who else talks about those shows? You’re not the only person your age, yet when The Office came out I don’t recall reading comparisons to Operation Goodguys, People Like Us, or Victoria Woods’ films. Again, you may be right! Even so, you’re being a real turd about it. And “hipster” isn’t an age-related identifier. You can be 80 and a hipster. It’s a behavioral/attitude-related term. “Oh, you like X? Well X is just a ripoff of Obscure Shit Y, which I happen to know about cuz niche knowledge makes me better than you.”No need to be so shirty about it, you bell-end. (Am I Britishing correctly, guv?)
You forever lost credibility for calling Victoria Wood, “obscure”.I didn’t think I was better than you until that point, I just thought The Office was shit.
I didn’t, actually. I was just explaining hipsterism. But as you’re determined to dislike and insult me, what the fuck ever.Oh noes! I lost credibility with an internet nobody prick!(Exaggerated masturbation mime)
You do realize you started with the insults, no?
I said he was being a hipster and jerky. AND that he may well be correct in his opinion! Only by the most pedantic definition of insult was I insulting him. Then comes the not shocking declaration of superiority. (Shrug)
In case it’s not clear to you, opinions about The Office aside, it’s you who comes across as the asshole in this conversation.
See above re: (shrug)
You literally opened up the conversation with an insult, and continued to insult me with every reply and now you’re upset that, I’m “determined to dislike you”.Have you considered it’s because you’re an arsehole?
Then I’m in excellent company!
Dude what the fuck are you talking about. You sound like a crazy person
come on, man. the office completely revolutionized the tv comedy.
No it didn’t.It ripped off shows like Operation Good Guys, People Like Us etc. etc. only worse.The Office is terrible, it’s the lowest common denominator of its genre.
The Office is terrible . . .
lol
It’s a just a shitty version of better shows that came before it, I’ve never been so happy in my life than when America seemed to embrace him and took him away from the UK television scene.
You mean the Larry Sanders show?
I’d like a piece of that five-cups-cake.
It’s become pretty clear to me that on The Office and Extras Gervais brought the acidic satire and Merchant brought the flawed humanity. And I think Merchant’s solo work fare betters because even if he doesn’t quite have the laser focus/axe to grind on the topic area that Gervais does, his characters are at least enjoyable to be around.
I feel similarly about Wes Anderson without Owen Wilson. He’s *okay* by himself or with Noah Baumbach or another co-writer but imo his best work was co-written with Wilson.
Well said. The best partnerships, professional or personal, challenge each person to be the best version of themselves while also being supportive. Gervais joins the ever-increasing pile of artists who thought they could transcend their past work by going it alone.
Beat me to the punch on this one. Yup. All his post-Merchant stuff is awful.
To be fair, Life Is Short was a Gervais-Merchant project and it was pretty bad.Having said that, it was still miles better than Derek, which was a massive piece of shit…
For me, it’s whatever happened between Seasons 2 and 3 of Derek. Season 2 was so earnest and heartbreaking and justified all of its inappropriateness with heart and humanity. Then season 3 was just…the same people all showing up again and saying words.Then his Netflix special came out, and he mostly talked about how big his house was and stood there and described twitter battles he had been in as if he were some sort of hero. It’s like he finally got enough money that his ego caved in on itself, and it transformed him from a naturally curious contrarian who took joy in questioning the world around him, to an asshole who thinks he knows everything.I think he used to be a reasonably good ambassador for atheists and secularists, but he’s quickly turned into THAT atheist. The one a lot of us started out as when we were bitter angry teens. Most people grow out of it. Gervais is somehow Benjamin Buttoning back into it.
I hope you have actually watched the series before making this comment
It it’s good, will this series retroactively make the last ten years of Gervais’ output funny?
It’s weird to realize that David Brent is the least asshole Ricky Gervais part, including the part of real life “Ricky Gervais.”
I have no issues with his atheism stuff (it was mildly diverting in The Invention of Lying,) but the sheer smugness he radiates in everything else he’s done makes me want to punch him almost as much as certain politicians.Extras was pretty good in spite of Gervais, and basically nothing else since has been worth watching.Also, he’s a bigger asshole than most celebrities on Twitter. This review makes this project sound utterly god-awful as well.
I feel like I say this in every Gervais related article but it bears repeating that the funniest thing he’s done in the last decade was bringing someone funnier than him into the spotlight
I’m glad the US is catching up to the fact that Gervais is a no talent hack.
He is undeniably talented, he just hasn’t put those talents to good use for a while.
I deny he’s talented, he really isn’t undeniably talented, he’s a hack who gurns at the camera like a moron if Merchant isn’t there to write what needs to come out of his mouth.
I’ve said it before, but I am deeply saddened that Ricky Gervais became a recluse after Extras and never produced anything ever again.
I recall that other British series “You, Me and the Apocalypse”, another exercise in self-indulgent nihilist assholerie. There are cruel and bleak aspects of British ‘humour’ that don’t translate at all well for American audiences. Its not that we don’t get the joke, its that we don’t recognize that there’s a joke to get.
how is ‘not recognizing there’s a joke to get’ different than ‘not getting the joke?’
The world is frequently a cruel and bleak place – you can either recognise that and find the absurdity in it, or distract people from it. That’s not to say that the former is more worthy, but it comes from an acceptance of inequality and unfairness in life, rather than a compulsion for self-betterment. Things like class divides are so heavily entrenched in the UK that people are much more comfortable mining their tragedy for laughs.
Having said all that, I think pronouncements about the differences between American and British comedy are mostly pointless, particularly as the line between the two has been blurred by the falling prominence of the TV sitcom. But there’s definitely a cultural difference between what the ‘average’ American and Brit finds funny, which will always be interesting to explore.
I’m neither British nor American (I’m an Aussie, sometimes considered the bastard product of the two cultures), but I’m skeptical of this idea that Americans don’t get British humour. My understanding is that a bunch of great British comedy got a very warm reception in the States, including Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and the work of Gervais himself. And I definitely think the best American comedy shares some of the dryness and appreciation of absurdity that characterises British comedy. (Arrested Development, the Good Place, etc.)
Fawltry Towers was well into last century, in the 1970s. Python came out when I was a *child* and now I’m in my 60s. To claim American must get *current* British humor because of a PBS show forty years ago is a stretch. I’m not talking dry humor or ironic humor or absurdist humor, I’m talking nasty cruel malicious mean spirited humor. As to the work of Gervais himself, have you read the comments here? Has there been an American poster saying ‘Yeh, I see what he’s trying to do.”?
I’m British and tried to get two friends to hatewatch After Life with me cause I thought it’d be funny. One tapped out in actual despair after the first episode, episode two was so similar to episode one that it destroyed even the “laughing at Gervais being bad at his job” aspect.I think everyone can see what he’s trying to do, that’s part of the problem, it’s really shallow and not well executed. For some reason Americans seem desperate to play Cards Against Humanity with me (“No? Too dark?”) and The Big Bang Theory was an enormous success. What’s the typical American sense of humour exactly?
“punish[ing] everyone around.. by being an unfiltered asshole… tak[ing] the form of a dreary, sarcastic self-pity party…”I don’t know if I’ve seen a better synopsis for the modern state of comedy.
“punish[ing] everyone around … by being an unfiltered asshole”- The AV Club.
If there’s one thing Ricky Gervais does for me, it’s making me wish that Eddie Izzard was doing more work.
He’s on tour!
And I’m seeing him tonight!
I have no doubt this sucks, and that Gervais’ recent output has been disappointing, but I am loving the absurd mental gymnastics people in this comment section are doing to convince themselves that eithera) Gervais was not instrumental to the British Office being one of the funniest shows ever made, orb) Perhaps even more ridiculously, that the British Office wasn’t even that good to begin with.
Hear Hear dude, Alla these ghetto Freuds peering into Gervais’s cranium missed the diagnosis by a country mile – The Office was almost like seeing Raiders the first time. Perhaps the first season of Afterlife isn’t the greatest, but second season has been blowing doors. Contrary to haters claiming Gervais /Tony is a blackhearted actor/character looking down his nose at perceived lessers, I see deeply wrought emotion well portrayed, such that I’ve shed tears once or twice. Where else have you seen so much space provided for elderly/dead characters?
it feels like every time gervais tries to make something without karl pilkington and steve merchant it just confirms that the funny ones in his earlier works were always karl pilkington and steve merchant
No jokes about how ridiculous the existence of trans people is? I guess he saves that for Twitter.
*how ridiculous he thinks the existence of trans people is. Did everyone else’s edit button disappear or just me?
Shut the fuck up already – nobody likes you.
That comes in season 2 (literally)
I continue to find the decline of Ricky Gervais fascinating. I adore his early output. The Office and Extras are two of my favourite sitcoms ever, while the XFM radio show and podcasts with Karl Pilkington have been in regular rotation for going on about ten years now.
And yet almost nothing Ricky Gervais has done since An Idiot Abroad has made me laugh. Derek had its moments but was also a treacly, saccharine mess that featured both a disabled man with a heart of gold and a pervy friend who tried to have sex with pensioners (who also had a heart of gold underneath the rapey-ness). Special Correspondents didn’t contain a single funny joke. David Brent: Life on the Road was unbelievably lame and had a saccharine ending for no good reason. Even his last stand up special Humanity paled in comparison to his previous releases.People say Stephen Merchant must have been the genius but I don’t think that’s true. I think Gervais and Merchant brought out the best in each other and curbed each other’s worst instincts (over-the-top emotions and overuse of cringe comedy), but I think more than anything Gervais let fame get to his head and turned into Andy Millman from Extras. He rarely takes the piss out of himself anymore (compared to post-Office when he was just known as fat funnyman), he becomes deadly serious about offensiveness and atheism, and all his films and TV shows have to attempt to be dramatic even though they fall flat.
I’m reminded of Jerry Lewis who got a big head from reading about his ‘genius’ back when he was with Dean Martin. Then he went solo and the egotistical vanity projects started piling up, each one more unwatchable than the last.
I though not being funny was the new comedy?
Is it a coincidence that the AVClub starts giving bad reviews to people as soon as they don’t agree with their politics?
I thought the title was referring to a new stand up special.
Is it just because so many brits are self-effacing like Stephen Merchant that Gervais thinks the basic act of being overly self-assertive is funny? Is it more funny to people in England, or at least maybe freeing? Because in the US we have too many people like that and don’t need to make up more.Atheists perplex me, you can’t prove there isn’t a god any more than you can prove there is a god, but such a significant number of atheists use their unfounded certainty as the basis for asserting superiority over everyone else. You may as well ask “Is there a fat man buying combos at the CVS down the way right now?” The believer professes to know there is, but who can say, maybe they just don’t want to get ostracized from their family or social circle. Then you have Gervais saying “NO STUPID there’s 100% NO fat man buying combos right now!” It’s bad enough we keep pretending we understand things just by giving them names and pretending we knew that would happen when things we didn’t know would happen, happen. I just don’t see why they ascribe such value to being completely certain about something, especially when (unless you guessed wrong and it’s a jealous god who wants you to feed it hot dogs) it doesn’t really matter one way or another. I just feel the same way about them I feel about the religiosos who believe God is exactly 6’1 and drinks whole milk every day, just like, bless your heart.
… okay.
Atheists perplex me, you can’t prove there isn’t a god any more than you can prove there is a oof
Argument from ignorance.
You can’t prove there is no god but as there is no evidence for a god, there is no need to invent him.
Atheists perplex me, you can’t prove there isn’t a god any more than you can prove there is a god, but such a significant number of atheists use their unfounded certainty…For me it’s more of a certainty that agnosticism is the most boring and pointless position of all. Sure, maybe there’s a creator of the universe, but it’s certainly not like the God that is imagined by man, and we can’t currently detect such a being by scientific means, so who gives a shit. For all practical purposes, there is none. If you want a medal for saying “maybe!” then you are welcome to it, but I’m going to focus more on the challenges of living a meaningful life.
Not knowing and not caring are too often grouped together. No reason to stop looking. I also don’t see why we couldn’t detect god scientifically, that seems no more or less plausible than any other answer. God could very well change stoplights to green when you’re driving on a good day, I’d just need a bit more than that to base a religion around it if the point wasn’t just to steal $$$ from you or exercise social control (and abuse children). Gnostics believed that knowledge and meaning itself were god, i.e., when Jesus said “I am the word” he was being literal, so maybe borderline pointless discussions parsing out absurdities are religious rites—this is a holy comment board!!!!
In my experience, while it may indeed be a boring and pointless position rather than demanding a medal most agnostics just tend to shrug, admit they’ve got no clue and find something else to do with their lives. Which seems a lot closer to the “who gives a shit” side of the scale than Ricky Gervais, who these days practically screams “GIVE ME A MEDAL MY ATHEISM MAKES ME SO INTERESTING AND EDGY” when his work arguably became a lot less interesting the more he started to use it as a polemic for how there’s no God.
Christians refuse to believe that 99 out of the 100 gods out there being worshiped exist. Why is it such a big deal to not believe that the 100th god out there exists either?
? I’m not saying I have a problem with atheism, it’s the certainty and fervor of it (not to mention that it seems to go hand in hand with MRAs like Christopher Hitchens). If it wasn’t clear, I hate the certainty and fervor of the religious zealots also, but condemn atheists who don’t recognize the same flaw in themselves…kind of like how I condemn leftists who bring out the pitchforks for the slightest potential of racial or gender bias but are blatantly anti-semitic. Yeah, not a huge fan of “you’re an idiot because there is no god and I am 100% certain of that somehow” or of “you’re going to hell to burn for eternity because you condone homosexuality and safe and legal abortion despite that I paid for my mistress’s abortion and sent my son to anti-gay camp where he was molested then committed suicide”—of the two at least being a dick about being an atheist isn’t itself the cause of death and misery.
Gervais hates himself.I’m not kidding.And he hates his audience for being stupid enough to like him.This is him lashing out at his audience for being stupid in the same way he lashed out at The Golden Globes celeb audience for accepting him into the fold after “The Office” and “Extras”.He’s doing the exact same thing and his fans STILL don’t get that he’s looking down on them.
I was watching the fat jokes pile up and noticing he didn’t get actors who were much bigger than him (but they were all definitely, clearly bigger than him, and dared to eat in public), and the fact his saintly dead wife also said things about his weight more than once, and then thinking no, he can’t POSSIBLY be thinking “the actual real joke is that I’m also a little bit fat.” But maybe that’s all it is, it really is like he’s just hating everything and doesn’t really understand it.
“there’s gotta be some discourse on the obvious beauty of atheism”Yeah, ‘cuz preachy loudmouth self-righteous atheists are totally not as irritating and obnoxious as preachy loudmouth self-righteous religious folk…
Yeah, ‘cuz this site never ridicules discourse on the obvious beauty of God.
The only thing lame on NETFLIX is that “Russian Doll” nonsense.
Wow, bringing up something completely unrelated to the topic at hand just so you can shit on it. Are you the ghost of MANIMAL?
Right, I’ll put the kettle on.
I’d just like to reiterate that every single one of your comments that I unfortunately run across is incredibly inane. I can’t imagine how the people in your real life don’t constantly bash you across the face the moment you start speaking.
This honestly sounds like it might be the worst TV show ever made. Good day!
Rather than some kind of madcap dark comedy, the “punishment” takes the form of a dreary, sarcastic self-pity party that also manages to constantly point out its protagonist’s intellectual superioritySo, it’s like his Twitter account, basically
yawn
In After Life, the Office and Extras creator
plays a recent widower who’s so angry about his wife’s death that he
decides to punish everyone around him by being an unfiltered asshole Ricky Gervais.
It’s been fairly obvious from the start that Gervais fancies himself as a Capra-type character. He leans into the schmaltz in such an artless manner though.
This reminds me: Watching David Brent: Life on the Road was a complete waste of time.
Didn’t see a single comment here about Merchant’s “Hello Ladies,” and while it was far from perfect, it gave me a lot more pleasure than any of Gervais’ later stuff. I would have liked to have seen what a second season could have accomplished.
Anyone see that weird David Cross’ UK comedy where Stephen Mangan juggled having two wives/families? I was just so bleak and angry and this feels like exactly the same kind of energy.
So Ricky Gervais is essentially the British version of Kevin Smith. Only instead of stoners it’s IAmVerySmart?
He needs to find a way of getting the gang back together. I really miss his podcast/animated series. I don’t think on camera works for Carl Pilkington and Steven Merchant is a great writer but a horrible actor.
There are few things more tiresome in comedy than the setting up and then mocking of “idiots” with the implication that our smart protagonist is oh so much better than them. There’s nothing wrong with idiocy as fuel for comedy – ‘Arrested Development’, with its never-ending roster of oblivious fools, did so excellently – but I despise this idea that the world is split into two groups, the smart and the stupid, and that the former is inherently better than the latter.Also, having Gervais’ wife buried next to the husband of the other character may be the most literal example of a plot contrivance ever.
Also, why do two atheists spend so much time in a graveyard?
It’s over a year later, but you deserved more stars.
For someone from present day Europe to proclaim that he’s an atheist is like proclaiming you’re right handed. Who isn’t these days? Even the Archbishop of Cantebury recently called the UK a post-Christian nation. Prince Charles is a practicing Buddhist. There’s something self-congratulatory about Gervais’s proclamations of atheism, as though he considers himself sooooo clever that he discovered something that nobody else knew about.
Since we brought up atheism, this isn’t really relevant, but I was watching a video with other British comedian / person people consider smart David Mitchell and he was discussing why he identifies as an agnostic. It was more or less the usual stuff — no proof either way, he’s not opposed to the idea of a spiritual element to the universe, doesn’t personally believe or feel that strongly, so on and so on. And yet throughout the comments, there were so many comments from so many self-identified atheists correcting by saying things along the lines of well actually, he’s clearly an atheist, and his definition of agnosticism is actually just atheism, and he should just come out and call himself an atheist because that’s the correct way of putting it, and so on.And I just remember thinking… why do you care so much? Even if David Mitchell was using a word wrong (and I don’t remember if he was, but nevertheless), why does it matter so much to you what word a middle-aged British comedian uses to describe his religious beliefs or lack thereof? How will it affect your life in any way if David Mitchell thinks he’s an agnostic other than the fact that you’ll have one less celebrity clever person to put in your corner of the debate?In short, why do so many atheists seem to think they have to treat atheism like a religion?Anyway, this show looks horrendous. He hasn’t been funny for a while, but Gervais should stick to at least trying to be funny rather than trying to be serious and deep.
In the first of After Life’s six half-hours, Gervais’ character, Tony, meets a series of broadly drawn idiots—small-town simpletons whose stupidity only shines a light on his smarts. Yep. For all Gervais clearly thinks of himself as some kind of intellectual wunderkind, he noticeably only ever seems to pit himself against people who either aren’t as smart or aren’t as capable of talking back as he is.Look at Karl Pilkington. The man might not be an idiot, but you don’t exactly have to be Bertram Russell to run verbal rings around him either.
“The Invention of Lying” has to be the most wasted premise in the history of film. You set up a premise that could have leaned hard into so many philosophical subjects, but simply makes a few religious jokes and then turns into a bottom-of-the-barrel romcom about whether a hot woman can learn to love a dumpy guy.
If Gervais is a militant atheist, that explains a few things.
His last stand up special was repugnant.
And yet I found it soundly hilarious.
How odd that we don’t agree.
I’ve only seen the first episode but I actively hated it, and think the show deserves a F grade. It’s mean spirited, obnoxious and tiresomely offensive, and put me in a really bad mood after watching it as it’s so pathetic, and yet despite this certain people on twitter seem to be going mad for it. If anyone’s interested a full review’s here, where I was probably too kind to the show when I called it one of the worst pieces of comedy I’ve ever seen. https://comedytowatch.wordpress.com/2019/03/08/tv-review-after-life-series-1-episode-1/
It’s fine. It was fine.
Good luck. Personally, I insert stock anti-Gervais sentiment here. For the upvotes.
I didn’t absolutely hate this, it was watchable for the most part I thought, but yeah, there were some clangers in there. Couldn’t agree more about the tonally awkward death, bit of a weird one to say the least. I also enjoyed the pre-death drugs deal conducted in the woods…. it was exactly how someone who’s never been involved with drugs or the buying of them would write a drugs deal scene. It was how my Nan would write a drugs deal scene. I will admit though that I did get a bit emotional during the Rocket Man sequence: “I miss the earth so much/I miss my wife” as he remembered his wife on the sofa was a kick in the feels. But then I am a well-known softy and a sucker for a bit of Elton.In short, as many have said here, Gervais needs moderating. And that’s fine, we all do. But he definitely works better when he collaborates, and creates genius when that’s with Stephen Merchant. I hope that they bury the hatchet one day and come back with something great.
Loved this, I’m a fan I must admit, maybe the best show he’s done. Heartbreakingly beautiful.
What bollocks.
No way a ‘D’… the last episode was a bit schmaltzy, but the rest was biting and funny. 10 times a day I want to say stuff that he was saying, but of course I never do. Maybe (takes a few steps back) you Yanks didn’t get it….